This is just to say that I'm not okay right now. But also that I am working on it, and that things will get better.

Anyone versed in trauma is already nodding along, because honestly, this is right on schedule. Dayenu, it would have been enough just to have a year when I lost a family member and two cats and all the other hideous stuff I went through, and also to have my only child go to college. Add in the escalating domestic violence and rape and a bunch of other Big Life Stuff...

Basically, June was me getting through the immediate aftermath. July was me squaring it away and having that much-needed break in Chicago, which helped so tremendously you don't even know. August was devoted entirely to Elayna, to getting her ready for college.

And September...

I have no structure, no one to hold things together for, no direction, just a MASSIVE load of trauma I have been shoving off to the side.

So September has been me falling apart.

...I am having a very hard time with all of this.

Right now I am at Zero Cope. I am at a point where my priorities aren't "do fun new project", they're "eat a meal" and "get out of pajamas and into actual clothes if possible, but if you can't, that's okay." Lots of baby steps. Lots of Calming Manatee. I have almost no emotional energy, so every bit of energy that I do have has to go into self-care. Which can be reading a book, or doing easy knitting, or taking a walk, or whatever. I am at the very basics right now.

As for how you can help, I don't think there's a way right now. I think what I need is this space to collapse in, and then the space to figure out what I need and what happens next. If I think of a way people can help, I promise I'll say so.

I was at Zero Cope for a while last year. I'm glad that I have words for it now. I'm glad you know what it is and what you need. I'm glad that you're not upset at yourself for needing time. I hope that each day gets better.

"...part of you pours out of me in these lines from time to time."~~"Case of You", Joni Mitchell

"There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." ~~"Anthem", Leonard Cohen

"If you wanna be immortal, you gotta have something to trade in." ~~"Anything", Foetus

"This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy."~~George Bernard Shaw

"The real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish."~~Terence McKenna

"When we die, we will turn into songs, and we will hear each other and remember each other."~~Rob Sheffield

"I have a sickness in the brain. I'm allowed to make no sense to you puny mortals with your fully operational head-meat."~~Spider Jerusalem

"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."~~Lois McMaster Bujold

"Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal."~~Albert Camus

"Being able to speak the unspeakable is very powerful. If we can hear another person express where they get stuck, or lost, or repeat a negative pattern, it builds a bridge."~~SARK

"Myths and legends die hard in America."~~Hunter S. Thompson

"Don't undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible."~~Edwin Land

"Having faced the fire of your initiation and survived its heat, you can now serve others in a whole new way. By being a living testimony to life transformed, you carry in your cells a sacred knowledge, and in your mind and heart a sacred fire. It's not the fire of youth but the fire of Prometheus, who emerged with the light that would light the world. It's a light that you only could have gotten from having faced some version of your personal hell, and now you are inoculated to the fires which rage around us. Sometimes it is fire that puts out fire, and such is the fire that now burns in you. This is not the fire of your destruction but of your victory. It is the fire of the middle years."~~Marianne Williamson

"Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed…what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness…it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealously among the prime themes of literature."~~Virginia Woolf

"The Universe puts us in places were we can learn. They are never easy places, but they are right. Wherever we are is the right place, at the right time. The pain that sometimes comes is part of the process of constantly being born."

"I will tell you a great secret, Captain, perhaps the greatest secret of all time: The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station, and the nebula outside - that burn inside the stars themselves. We are star-stuff. We are the Universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. And, as we have both learned, sometimes the Universe requires a change of perspective."~~Delenn, Babylon 5

I am kenning all I canShe and I, me and my mind,Writing hard for the one true thingThat lets you let me inBeguiling what must to gain the trust of the minutemenI am worth investing inand I never stop spinning.

Kenning yarns out of my skinWith a leaky borrowed penSwirling stars and stories inWill you let the light leak in?